Early in the morning, in the dimness of the grey early light, Hermione stole through deserted corridors, descending from Gryffindor tower to the dungeons to knock at the door of Professor Snape's study. He opened at once, not at all sleepy, fully dressed in his black robes, as if he had slept completely clothed in them, perhaps while hanging from the dungeon rafters, upside down, like a huge bat.
Without a word, he led her inside, motioning to the small table reserved for students carrying out inane, tedious acts of punishment during detentions. She hopped into the miserable little desk as if it was an amusement park ride, her posture straight and eager, almost vibrating.
A habitual teacherly sadism kept Snape moving slowly as she waited, stretching toward the highest shelf behind his desk, unlocking a glass cabinet housing his special collection of forbidden books on corporeal magic.
"You read runes, I trust?"
"Yes, sir."
He hummed dubiously and tossed a copy of his own personal key to runes from the books' time period onto the top of the stack he set on her table.
Awed, reverent, she opened the cover of the largest of the forbidden books, skimming its opening pages. "It's very much like the one in the library," she said, flipping through the familiar chapters, "Only - yes!" she nearly squealed. "It's written without the cyphers. It's in plain language, like a cookbook. At last!"
"That's all very well, Miss Granger," Snape clipped, from where he now sat behind his desk. "But I regret I am not available to field your line-by-line commentary on your studies. Make notes of your observations, organize them into a readable format, and I will look at them when you've finished."
"Oh," she said. "Of course. Sorry, sir."
She glanced at the door, wishing Draco would appear to listen to everything she found, reflecting her excitement and fascination with his own. She sighed, dipped her quill, and scratched away at her notes.
A few things came to light rather quickly. Compared to original, unmodified Mitrian love charms, the one she'd cast on Draco in the hospital wing at the end of fifth year was stronger than usual because she had used Crookshanks, a half-magical creature, instead of a standard dove as the animal familiar. That, she already knew.
But at the same time, her version of the charm was weaker because she hadn't done it on the optimal date, with the best possible stars in the best possible motions and positions overhead. She'd need to consult a star map if she wanted to strengthen that aspect of their charm, and that was a task well-suited to Draco, once he was up for it.
The placement of the charm on Draco's body could have been stronger too. The monks advised inscribing the charm over the heart, but since the left forearm was of particular interest to Voldemort, perhaps it was for the best that she'd put it there.
Finally, she had cast her spell without any verbal incantation, let alone the one the monks had composed. She had written it using her wand as a stylus without speaking anything aloud. For best results, the monks called for the caster to do both.
It might be possible to add all of these things to the charm Draco already had. And if they did, it might heal the lines and figures that had been broken to fragments when the Dark Mark was branded over them. The fine tuning of these missing elements might bring the charm back to a more perfect form. But would a restoration like that make the charm strong enough to sever their unwanted connection to Voldemort, or would it make their attachment to him stronger, more dangerous, fatal?
She sat puzzling over it, her eyes fixed on sunlight dawning in the long, flat window high on the wall opposite her desk.
"The smaller volume," Snape intoned from his desk without looking at her. "The one with the shredded binding."
Hermione set aside the large book to look at the crumbling, water-stained, torn volume Snape recommended. It seemed older than the others, its runes more arcane. Even with the help of Snape's key, reading it was slow going. She battled through it for several pages, finding nothing she did not already know, growing anxious as the clock ticked closer to the beginning of the school day, when Snape would leave, and she would have to go too.
"That will do for this morning, Miss Granger," he said, almost as soon as she'd thought it herself. "Report back here after classes to resume your studies."
She skipped back up the stairs, heading not toward the smell of hot breakfast coming from the Great Hall, but toward the hospital wing, looking for Draco, to tell him what she'd read.
Pansy was already in the hospital wing when Hermione arrived, sitting at the foot of Ron's bed. He would not be discharged today, though he was looking much better than when Hermione had last seen him, sitting up in bed, tucking into a bowl of porridge.
Ron was waving her over. "Hermione, Pansy's thought of something brilliant - "
"Sorry, Ron. I'm in a hurry to catch Draco. Has he left yet?"
"No, not quite yet," Pansy answered for Ron, annoyed at Hermione's disregard for him. Her smile was stiff, her eyes slightly narrowed. "Better hurry in there."
What Pansy hadn't told Hermione was that she had just brought Draco a fresh uniform from their dormitory and, behind the curtains, he was likely to be midway through changing his clothes. Sure enough. Hermione walked in and her cheery hello morphed into a stifled shriek.
Draco yelled back at her. He was standing beside the bed in his trousers, belt undone and shirtless, his Dark Mark plainly visible. When he saw it was her, he swore in relief. "Granger, what are you doing, coming in here screaming?"
"Sorry."
He dropped the shirt he'd snatched up to cover himself. "Look at you, acting shy, as if you didn't spend all day yesterday cuddled up against my bare chest."
"I'm sorry." She laughed at herself. "I didn't expect - "
"You didn't?" He was walking toward her, buckling his belt but still only half dressed. "When you come into someone's room in the morning, at the prime time for them to be getting dressed for the day - "
"Yes, yes, I don't know what I was thinking. I suppose I was just excited to tell you about my research with Snape."
"Excited about her research," he repeated in a slow, rumbling voice. He had come close enough to touch her.
"Yes, I found out…" her voice trailed off as he stepped into her space, distracted first by his healing chest wound and then by the rest of him. "Draco? Malfoy, you haven't - finished - dressing."
He ran one finger down the length of her crisp white sleeve. "Before you tell me about the books, would it be alright if I wished you good morning first?"
She smiled, her cheeks flushed, raising her hands, her fingertips pressed against his stomach. His skin was cool and taut. "I thought you said you weren't in the shirts-off set."
"I'm not," he said, walking into her hands. "That's why I'd rather not waste a rare moment like this."
He folded his bare arms around her, his skin sliding over her hair where it fell down along her back. He pressed her into his chest, and she moved the smooth, softness of her face against him, first one cheek, and then the other. Her hands returned his embrace on the surface of his back, her palms moving over the angles of his shoulder blades, to the nape of his neck, trailing down to his waist.
He hummed and swayed. "Such a small thing," he said, his breath in her ear, "but not for us."
She kissed him over his heart, leaving her lips against him long enough to sense his heart beating, still relieved beyond expression that he had survived these harrowing past six months. If his charm had been applied exactly according to the monks' directions, in this spot, it would have glowed between them at this moment.
Suddenly possessive, she breathed deeply, greedily filling her head with his smell, filling the hollows of her palms with his warm, living skin. Unbidden, her eyes closed, as if it was dazzling, how much she adored him. This was what really made the charm work - not the stars or incantations but this feeling, this closeness.
He had to be safe. She had to save him.
There were footsteps outside the curtain as Madam Pomfrey set about her morning rounds. She was dealing with Ron first, giving Hermione time to drag herself away.
"Get your shirt before someone sees - it," she said, grazing his mark with her finger.
He groaned a complaint, but she was right. It wouldn't do for him to be seen for what he was supposed to be.
She turned her back, as if modesty was something he cared about between them. "We need to get going anyway. Breakfast will be ending soon and you're in no position to give it a miss." She turned around to find him buttoned into his shirt, tugging on the ends of his tie. She said, "Look at how lean you're getting. What would your mother say?"
Draco stood beside his hospital bed, his hands frozen part way through his Windsor knot. What would his mother say if she saw him for the first time since their last ghastly meeting in the manor? Was her life any less of a nightmare than it had been the night she returned from Azkaban to find the Dark Lord interrogating her son? Had he and Hermione made things worse for her yesterday, when they activated the charm to show Potter and Weasley?
Madam Pomfrey threw the curtains wide open. "Well, Mr. Malfoy, I'd like to have you stay a bit longer, but Professor Snape says you can go. So that's that. Report back here in the evening to let me have another look at that chest wound. Otherwise, you can take your Miss Granger and be on your way."
With the curtain flung open, Hermione's eyes began to dart around the room. "I'll go down first," she said, about to leave him there re-tying his tie.
Draco called her back. "Why? What's the point in hiding us now?"
She stopped mid-turn. "Because we don't - " she began to say. But they'd agreed the night before that there was nothing to be gained by continuing to act like they weren't together, especially now that everyone knew.
"This is a new phase in our relationship," he said, tucking the end of his tie into his jumper. "I'd say we've mastered forbidden love. Now we take on the challenge of normal love. Which means you wait for me, take my hand, and we go down to breakfast together."
She lifted her chin. "Alright. I'll wait for you, Malfoy."
"Thank you, Granger." And with that, he joined their hands.
She called out a goodbye to Ron as they left, waving at him with her hand still held in Draco's. "We're dashing off to catch the end of breakfast. Malfoy's return to good health depends on it."
Draco rolled his eyes and muttered a weak protest but followed after her anyway.
Ron responded with a genuine but uneasy smile. "Are you then? Best of luck to you both, I guess," he said, shouting the rest as they disappeared out the door. "And come right back here at noon, Hermione. I've still got something important to tell you."
If Professor Snape had still been teaching Advanced Potions, Hermione, Draco, and Harry would have noticed and worried when he did not appear in class that morning. As it was, they were on their way to brewing obliviously away with Slughorn when Snape clutched at his arm in the corridor outside his Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom.
The Dark Lord was calling.
At a pace just under a run, he moved through the castle, against the flow of students parting to get out of his way as they headed to their classes. He was soon out the doors, where cold fresh air set back the heat in his arm for just an instant, and he was running over the grounds, toward the gates where a pair of Aurors stood guard.
"You," he hissed to them, "find the headmaster at once, and tell him I have been called on an urgent errand."
With a spin and squeezing tug, Snape was on the gravel drive outside Malfoy Manor. He breathed deeply, shook out the last of the pain and tension in his arm, found a scrap of parchment in his robes and, since the Fidelius spell prevented him from speaking it aloud, wrote Hermione Granger's name on it.
Before advancing any closer to the house, Snape closed his eyes to raise his occulmens barrier. It was not a wall of noise and chaos, after the method Bellatrix taught Draco, but a smooth, hard face with enough false avenues and dead ends - unsettling moments from his youth, embarrassing and unpleasant but not important - which made the landscape of his mind appear natural, as if there was no occulmency at work at all.
It was Narcissa herself who let him inside, skulking around the entrance in the grand hall, as was her habit now. Snape hadn't been to the manor since before the school term had resumed, meaning Narcissa was completely unmedicated by his calming draughts. Her resemblance to Bellatrix was growing the longer she was kept here with her. Narcissa's immaculate grooming had lapsed, leaving her with a wild look, her eyes circled with heavy darkness, exhausted but restless.
"Severus you've come. Thank the stars for you." She had taken his hand when he stepped inside, and as she spoke to him, she clawed upward, climbing his arm like a thick rope, taking him by the shoulders and holding his face between her hands. "He had a terrible fit last night. Tearing the dressing from his wand hand, overtaken by an awful blue light, and cursing - " her voice broke into a sob ''cursing my boy, my Draco."
Snape pulled her hands away from him, folding them and pressing them against her sternum. "If you truly care for your son, Madam, do not delay me any further."
"Severus, please…" she called after him.
He slammed the drawing room door on her cries. The Dark Lord sat in his chair by the hearth, his wounded hand unwrapped, the bandages still strewn over the floor, the flesh of his hand withered almost to bone, marred by scars like white scratches on pale jade.
Snape bowed, his hand extending the parchment with Hermione's name written on it. "My Lord I have news, the identity of the girl - "
"Has been known to me since yesterday, thanks to the reports of several of my other servants." The Dark Lord batted the parchment away, sending it falling to the floor with the old bandages. "How are you so late in coming, Severus? Why did I have to resort to summoning you? You - my most excellent of servants, beaten to a vital revelation by the likes of Goyle and his gossiping missus."
Bellatrix fell through the doorway, pouncing on Snape in this moment of reprisal. "Hiding her! He was hiding Harry Potter's mudblood to the very end! This is what he is, my Lord - not just double-minded but sentimental, soft hearted, weak and useless."
She pranced around the room, singing in a high mocking voice, "Such a good teacher, such a good teacher."
Snape ignored her. "My Lord, surely your connection to Potter revealed to you the events that have unfolded in Hogwarts during the past day."
The Dark Lord flicked a warning hex Bellatrix's way, crashing into the wall beside her, ending her capering. "I did indeed see Potter's mind - his attack, his adept handling of some Dark magic indeed. Unforeseen but not unwelcome. At the very least, Young Master Malfoy has a talent for inspiring fruitful rage." His voice rose to a shriek at the last word, his fascination with Potter degrading into his anger with Malfoy. "The boy's petty rivalry with Potter risks exposing his assignment. It must stop."
Snape bowed again. "Truly, my Lord." He raised his head, glaring at Bellatrix as she smirked at his groveling. "I am sure Madam Lestrange has informed you of the event that precipitated Potter's attack on young Malfoy, culpable as she is for it."
Her smirk twisted into a mask of rage. "What lie is this?"
"It was the Black sisters, my Lord, along with the same accomplice who instigated the debacle with the cursed necklace last term, who sent a bottle of poisoned mead to Hogwarts."
"Lies!"
"It was bound for the headmaster but was waylaid by a greedy professor, coming into the hands of Ronald Weasley instead. Potter instantly and easily made the connection between his friend's poisoning and the Black family, clumsy and obvious as it was. Naturally, he was seized with his signature sense of righteous indignation - and the rest you know."
Bellatrix screeched an objection. "Lies! It's all lies, my Lord! I would never undertake something so foolish."
"Oh no, you are the very model of wisdom and restraint," Snape sneered.
The Dark Lord cut off Bellatrix's rising voice with his own. "Yes, I see. It was the Weasley boy's poisoning which led to this. It was all there in Potter's mind. He was indeed blaming this ridiculous family for the mead coming into the school when he attacked. I remember. I remember as if it had been in my own mind."
Snape nodded. "Yes, and in the delicate aftermath of the poisoning and its revenge, while idle gawkers were free to run about bearing tales, I was occupied restoring order and raising sympathy for Draco, heading off an investigation that would have led the school's resident Aurors right here, and ended any hope of infiltrating the school through the vanishing cabinet."
Bellatrix was wailing. "My Lord the house of Black did not send this poison - "
"Ask your sister," Snape snarled over her protests. "It is no secret that Narcissa Black Malfoy has become fearful for her son to the point of being prone to the rashest misbehaviour. And her sister, though she boasts of loyalty and power, offers only empty talk and has, in fact, done nothing to stop her."
"Then we will stop her. Lock her in the cellar," the Dark Lord commanded.
"It won't hold her," Bellatrix replied, her voice close to sobbing. "Her dirty haunted house would never hold her there."
"In that case, I leave it to you, Bellatrix," the Dark Lord said. "Control your sister or be punished with her."
She turned on Snape, snarling. "You have done this. I would be a formidable soldier for the Dark Lord but you have undermined me and made me a nursemaid to my mad sister."
"No assignment made in the service of the Dark Lord is unworthy - "
"Silence, both of you," the Dark Lord said. "Enough, Bellatrix. See to your sister."
She left, muttering curses at Snape, crashes sounding through the halls as she retreated.
The Dark Lord beckoned Snape to his side. He knelt on the floor, examining the wounded hand. "Severus, with the caster of the charm revealed, I want the girl brought here. Tend to my hand and fetch the Granger girl at once."
Snape inspected the array of balms and vials on the table beside the armchair, opening, sniffing, mixing. "My Lord, at the time her identity became known, the headmaster took especial interest in her safety. I cannot remove her from the castle without alarm, and perhaps not without a confrontation with the headmaster himself. If that is what my Lord wishes - "
The Dark Lord swore. "No, not yet. Where once her anonymity protected her, now it is her infamy that protects her."
Snape nodded. "Indeed. The girl is heralded as clever but her gifts, like Potter's, lie much more in luck than in skill."
"Maddening," the Dark Lord said. "But not insurmountable."
They passed a moment in silence as Snape dressed and rewrapped the damaged hand. The flesh above the wrist was now beginning to shrink and twist, but he said nothing of it.
"The charm was activated yesterday, Severus."
Snape nodded. "The audacity," he said. And he meant it. Granger must have been showing it off for Potter, the arrogant, stubborn boy who wouldn't listen to her without tangible proof. It might be for the best. Snape still couldn't be sure. All he said was, "A sentimental gesture to soothe a young girl's feelings after young Malfoy's near death experience, no doubt. Typical but foolhardy. Regrettable."
His hand wrapped, the Dark Lord folded it against his chest. "I have seen for myself that Malfoy bears no ill effects when the charm is activated. I must learn whether any harm comes to the girl when I activate it myself."
Snape stiffened. "Shall I attempt to ingratiate myself to her, my Lord? Come to her in my role as a concerned teacher and gain her confidence, learn her secrets?"
The Dark Lord hummed. "Yes, we shall pursue that for now. Convince her she will suffer from this charm, guide her in learning how to lift it, so it vexes me no more. We shall proceed in this way, until young Malfoy gets us inside the castle. And then she will be first to die. See to it that young Malfoy is a witness when she does. He has not bargained with me in good faith and has earned my bad faith in return. As we agreed, I will spare his mother and father, but not his lover."
"Of course not, my Lord."
"Yes, Severus, you take it up with the girl. And I," the Dark Lord said, taking his wand in his left hand, "I shall deal with the boy."